[WG: Accessibility] FW: Equations (and charts) in FCK

[Richwine, Brian L]

Over the last few semesters at the ATC, we've had to put more and more energy into make math accessible for our students. We've been disappointed over the state of accessibility solutions for mathematics, and what we see as the lack of a commonly recognized somewhat universal and workable solution.



The email I am forwarding (below) come from the Building Sakai email list and reminds me to think creating accessible math in Sakai's context. I've mused on it a bit, and read through recommendations such as the Mathematics section in the IMS Guidelines for Developing Accessible Learning Applications (http://ncam.wgbh.org/salt/guidelines/sec11.html#sec11_1), but nothing jumps out.

Obviously, it would be great if Sakai users can create accessible content using Sakai. Does anyone have any experience with working solutions, or have suggestions on how content including accessible math could be created in Sakai?

I haven't seen any examples of accessible equation/expression editors on the web. Manually typing in MathML is rather labor intensive. Given the process outlined in the forwarded email below, I'd be tempted to suggest the LaTex could also be ran through a LaTex-to-Audio processor like AsTer (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/raman/phd-thesis/html/root-thesis.html) and a link to the created audio file posted along with the image. But, we've had terribly inconsistent and erratic results with the Braille translation systems we've tried that claimed to convert LaTex to Nemeth code - and the LaTex code wasn't generated by hand, but from the MathType editor!

-Brian




Brian Richwine

Adaptive Technology Support Specialist

Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Centers

Indiana University - Bloomington/Indianapolis

http://iuadapts.indiana.edu

(812) 856-4112







From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Algaze, Louis J
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2009 3:45 PM
To: Sakai Server
Subject: [Building Sakai] Equations (and charts) in FCK



We have been working on getting equations into Sakai and have come up with the following solution:

Phase 1:
Use Google Services to convert Tex to an image which uses an undocumented feature of Google charts, also in use by Google docs.
Put the following code into the source of the FCK area <img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chl=Tex goes here">.
An example is: <img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=tx&chl=f_p  = 3\sqrt {area}  = 3\sqrt {2 \times 10^6 }  = 53800Hz;\;53.8kHz">
Please review Google usage policy at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/
Additional variables available per the Google Chart specs

Phase 2:
Develop a caching system that will, when called (URL change above) will get the image from Google, store it locally and then deliver if it's already cached reducing the number of hits to Google.

Phase 3:
Put a button in the FCK editor that allows easy input of Tex, something that takes care of the code around the Tex, and maybe some basic Tex creation.

Phase 4:
Replace Google with our own Tex to image conversion application.

limitations discovered so far:

*       Equations have a maximum length and spaces in TeX are not necessary
*       Images are not https therefore some browsers display a warning, we might be able to change that in Phase 2
*       "+" is not rendered correctly, use %2B
*       Code to include in img link to make image background transparent is chf=bg,s,FFFFFF00


We are in development of this solution and are confident that all 4 steps can be implemented.  We are also open to feedback to see how others have put equations in Sakai.

Thank you,

Louis

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